The draft report Engage: getting on with government 2.0 has just been released.  The report is 159 pages long so it’s a fairly hefty piece of work looking at how government can better engage with the Australian public.

The sentiments within the report are good.  Open government is a nice idea but it remains to be seen whether open means “just ajar” or whether the door is really left open.  I am still to see how open government works within a political system that is essentially both protective of information and adversarial politically.  Perhaps there are some lessons from the UK government experience.  From what I hear, open government over there has caused a massive tsunami of useless information being made available at considerable expense.

Engagement is a nice idea too.  Government needs to better hear from, and collaborate with, the public.  There needs to be improved transparency and a more informed conversation between the public and government.  Online engagement will certainly be assisted if Australia ever manages to get a decent and affordable  telecommunications system.  The great Australian broadband initiative is still to come online.

One key message is for better engagement between the public and public servants. However, I sense from the report that what this engagement really means is that government departments increase information on websites to gargantuan proportions and, somehow, this plethora of “government information” is actually what people want.  Using my content management experience, I can tell you that what people use the internet for is to complete a particular task, or find out some information to complete a task, not just a casual trawl through government documents for the fun of it!

The report does talk about the web 2.0 tools and suggests that they can be used to facilitate greater engagement and interaction between the public and government.  The trouble is, for these tools to be effective they have to be placed within an information architecture and organisational culture that is not currently the norm, and in some cases completely opposed to openness and innovation.  Such conservative long-held public service cultural norms will not easily be dismantled and this will certainly limit the effectiveness of web 2.0 tools.  The tools won’t be the problem, but the operational architecture and hierarchical workforce structure of government will be inhibitors.

The online engagement strategy using public servants is also interesting.  I think this aspect will involve some major organisational cultural shifts, especially at senior levels of the public service.  Engaging online with public servants  has some pretty important ramifications. 

To start with, public servants work for the Minister first and the workplace culture is still one of protectiveness rather than openness. I’d love to see a truly open and innovative public service but I am not confident that one will emerge quickly enough to really make true public engagement count.  The notion of a public service that offers fearless and frank advice, let alone responds that way to the public, remains elusive in the current Australian political domain.

Furthermore,  there needs to be better funding of public servant agencies to allow people to allocate time to engage and respond to the public.  It’s all very well to say that government information is a public resource, but it’s people in the public service who have to find the time to provide appropriate information, and actually find and deliver the necessary information.  One only has to experience the intricacies of obtaining assistance through Centrelink, Veterans Affairs, and Health to know how difficult and time-consuming obtaining the right information can be.

There is likely to be a significant resource issue here since the technology alone will not be sufficient to really provide true levels of public-government engagement.  Perhaps the web 2.0 technologies, and some traditional web 1.0 technologies, will help governments provide a platform for engagement.  But these are only platforms.  This is why I fear that government websites will become massive dumping grounds for information rather than true portals of public-government engagement.  Plonk a trillion words and documents on a website and bingo – engagement!  It really doesn’t sound like a pathway for successful engagement to me.

There is also the issue about understanding what is required and who has the ability and capacity to find it.  As any librarian knows, the “reference interview” is sometimes difficult in any one-to-one encounter, let alone online.  In many public service agencies, these type of informal information requests come to a “library” or some “library-like function” because libraries are traditionally staffed by people whose experience is understanding the reference question and finding the resources best suited in answering the question.  Unfortunately, there is a perception in some quarters that libraries are not needed, or are not key players, within government departments.  Oddly, there are no additional resources elsewhere in government departments to undertake this kind of work, let alone by people skilled in finding, reviewing, and making quality judgements on.  Once again, I fear engagement only goes as far as a website crammed to the gunwales with information….and then sinking slowly under the weight.  Still, there might be opportunities for content managers and librarians in this area of government engagement.

The draft report also makes recommendations about privacy, security, and the “Commonwealth Record”.  Well folks, I gotta say, that many government agencies don’t have a complete understanding or proper record of the historical and current information within its own walls.  Unless there is significant investment in electronic document and records management, there can be no guarantee that government  information will be input onto a database within the organisation, let alone found and made available at the appropriate level of security and with accurate version control.  Records management and knowledge management need far greater attention in government than is currently the case.

I truly hope that the Australian government is open to many of the recommendations in the report, especially the important issues of openness and citizen engagement.  The job won’t be easy but I can say with confidence that there are plenty of information professionals – librarians, content managers, information architects, knowledge managers, records managers, information specialists, and web editors - that are keen to make the report’s message a reality if only government would give them the responsibility, the authority and resources to make it actually happen.

This is a beast of a post (although not as long as some others).  I am attempting to make some sense of my argument for my paper, so I am being thorough in the hope that I can get some good feedback.  Thanks in advance if you read all this.   Enjoy the journey:

In making my thoughts and assumptions explicit, I have very strong opinions about how World of Warcraft favors certain playstyles over others.  I feel that the design and “loudest” player groups have created a game culture that favors ambition, aggressiveness, and a focus on certain achievements over others.  (Warning: The following sentence might be highly subjective or half-baked).  High level or “epic/elite” activities, raiding, or player vs. player are seen as “better” than any-level activities like exploration, pet collection, or crafting.  While these any-level activities are not seen as unimportant, they don’t have near the prestige of the other activities, and are often treated as a means to an end.

So for my paper, I am analyzing FigurePrints, a service offered by Blizzard that allows World of Warcraft players to create a custom 3-D statue of their avatar in the game (for the mind-boggling price of $130).  After my first attempt at doing a semiotic reading, I have a vague sense of a thesis.  This is something along the lines of: The FigurePrints interaction favors dominant, aggressive, and high-level players over players that are low-level or less concerned with aggressive or competitive play.  I am trying to be careful that I don’t twist the evidence into saying what I want it to say, so I am posting this in the hopes that someone might tell me if I am just making stuff up, or if there is some legitimacy to what I am saying.  Or perhaps I just need to word my thoughts a different way.

I begin with a statement about what the figure itself represents.  It is a text that represents the player’s time investment, their attachment to the character and the character’s place in the history of the game lore, the character’s (and player’s) growth over time, the character (and player’s) growth in a larger social context of friends and other players in the game, and on and on.  It is a text of rich and personal meaning, and the choices that FigurePrints provides limit players to only certain kinds of meaning.  I will illustrate this with a syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the choices provided to players in the creation of the figure.

Syntagmatically-speaking, the creation of the FigurePrints statue consists of choosing from a Pose, a Base, and a set of Armor.

I think I need to explore the importance of limiting players to these 3 choices, but as of yet I haven’t analyzed it that much.  However, I currently can adequately speak about what each of these paradigms represent and what choices are given.

Pose as a representation of body language

Players can choose from 44 different poses, 33 of which involve the use of a weapon and depict the character in battle.  This leaves 11 poses that could reflect the character out of battle.  Of these 11 poses, 5 are gestures that depict behavior that is aggressive or negative in the culture of World of Warcraft.  There are the character poses of yell, chicken (taunt), rude (making an obscene gesture), train (a gesture that represents a despised activity in which a player or players, on purpose or on accident, lead a large group of monsters to another player resulting in chaos, game lag, and death), and beg (perhaps an even more despised behavior than a monster train).

The remaining 6 poses are stand, walk, wave, kiss, kneel, and sit.  Out of 44 possible representations of body language, this seems to be a very limited range of choices for creating a character figure that is NOT fighting or calling attention to the negative cultural aspects of the game.  Granted, the game is called World of WARcraft, not the World of Politeness and Compromise.  However, there is much more to a player’s character and gameplay than fighting.  Players engage in arguably more social/helpful scenarios than they do in fighting, and they collect plants, mine for metals, go fishing, craft items, and engage with storylines.  But there are no poses for any of these.

Base as a representation of [something]. < I don’t know what to put here yet.  It is a symbol of elevated status, of standing on top of something, of being built upon something.  I don’t know.  Anyway:

There are 4 choices of statue bases:

Choices for figure base

Marbled Floor: The “plainest” of all the bases, but represents a material of luxury and importance.

Horned Stand: Horns are aggressive, bestial, and associated with violence

Gold Mound: wealth, greed, achievement

Onyxia Base: This one is interesting in that it cost an extra $10, perhaps due to printing constraints.  However, more cost is usually associated with a “premium” or “superior” product, which in this case is the base that represents a large, epic battle against a dragon.  This particular battle is a well-known (relatively-speaking) raid in World of Warcraft, and is sort of a rite of passage for players that begin raiding.  Here the “premium” product is reserved for players concerned with raiding.

What is missing from this assortment of bases is the choice to have your character standing in a meadow, or at a crafting station, or near a fishing hole, all of which are places that exist in the game and can have very special meanings for players.

Armor as a representation of fashion and achievement

Choices of armor are limited to the armor you have actually collected in the game.  In the analysis I did, a level 80 character that has done many raids and player vs. player fights has 10 armor options as opposed to a level 20 character who has 3.  Additionally, 2 of these options are for Christmas outfits that every player has access to.  If you remove those options the armor choices are 8 to 1 in favor of the player that engages with game activities that reward players with special armor.

As I mentioned before, there are an incredible amount of activities that players can engage with.  Players can follow the storyline, harvest materials, craft items, play the stock-market on the auction house, explore the game world, collect pets, teach other players how to play, help out other players with difficult situations, make new friends, and on and on.  However, these activities in themselves are not rewarded with special sets of armor.  Special sets of armor are reserved for players that engage with high-level game content, and are successful in killing “epic” monsters, or defeating other players in tournaments.

Since FigurePrints only allows players to “dress” their character in the armor they have acquired in the game, this places a much higher value on high-level players concerned with raids and player vs. player activities.  This is most evident in the words used in the instructions:

Instructions for choosing what armor to put on the character

These are the instructions shown to all players, regardless of if they have 8 sets of high-level armor to choose from or 1 low-level set of armor.

Any player without high-level armor could be described as either not interested in those aspects of the game that provide the armor, or as not “advanced” enough to have acquired it.  By not providing this player with as many options to “dress” the character, the player is limited in the ways he or she can create a meaningful representation of his or her character.

FigurePrints situated amongst other texts

And then I can also talk about FigurePrints as a creative activity concerned with creating an artifact that represents the player’s character.  In seeing FigurePrints as this, I can compare it to many other artifacts that are created to represent the character:  costumes, drawings, forum signatures, fan fiction, and the WoW Armory just to name a few.  In exploring these artifacts, I have seen an interesting occurrence: artifacts that are created from scratch by players have very different qualities than artifacts that are generated using information from the game.

Some future design implications?

Namely, game-generated artifacts seem to focus on achievements, statistics, armor, and items.  Player-generated artifacts seem to focus on personal stories and social elements.  Some of this is discussed by Silvia Lindtner, Bonnie Nardi, and Fernanda Viégas.  This will be more important in the future as representations based on digital data become a source for decision-making.  If social spaces like World of Warcraft use their digital data to reduce the rich experience down to statistics and equipment, what implications does that have for the ways in which we value others and ourselves?

My next step will be to go back to my readings and start pulling out stuff that either explains in better detail what I am talking about or helps support my claims.  From there I will start constructing some sort of coherence.

Anyway, thanks for reading this.  I welcome all feedback, and I am especially concerned about:

• Am I twisting the evidence to support a bogus claim?
• Is there a better way to word this claim? (I think there is)
• How might I construct this argument for my paper?
• What have I missed?  Am I lacking something critical to making this argument?

Found at http://bstumpel.posterous.com/gartner-top-10-list-for-2010-vs-2009-trends

http://bstumpel.posterous.com/gartner-top-10-list-for-2010-vs-2009-trends

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“Cloud computing” tops Gartner’s recently released top 10 strategic technologies and trends for 2010. That bodes well for providers of on-demand call center solutions. Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

These technologies impact an organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

“Companies should factor the top 10 technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, in a release. “However, this does not necessarily mean adoption and investment in all of the technologies. They should determine which technologies will help and transform their individual business initiatives.”

“This list should be used as a starting point and companies should adjust their list based on their industry, unique business needs and technology adoption mode,” added Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “When determining what may be right for each company, the decision may not have anything to do with a particular technology. In other cases, it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology.”

Gartner defines cloud computing as “a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. Cloud-based services can be exploited in a variety of ways to develop an application or a solution. Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others. In addition, consuming cloud services enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners.”

The research firm is careful to distinguish the two main “styles” of cloud computing, “public cloud computing” – this includes the applications that software vendors deliver to organizations on a subscription basis, using the cloud or software-as-a-service model, which are delivered via the Internet or dedicated network and available to everyone willing to pay – and “private cloud computing,” which is where an enterprise or organization develops its own private cloud computing infrastructure and hosts the applications itself, sometimes making them available to outside people or entities, such as partners and affiliates.

A more recent report from Gartner predicts that over the next three years most enterprises will use a mix of public and private cloud computing, with more money being spent on private cloud computing, as it requires investment in new equipment and infrastructure.

The advantages of cloud-based solutions have been well-documented: Cloud computing allows organizations to deploy technologies quickly and easily, with minimal upfront investment. Because the vendor is responsible for maintaining all hardware and network infrastructure, as well as application performance, this model reduces the strain on company IT departments. In addition these solutions offer superior scalability – as well as improved integration capabilities. What’s more, organizations automatically get the latest and most advanced call center applications without having to perform expensive upgrades or purchasing new software licenses.

This year “cloud computing” bumped “virtualization” for the number one spot on Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies list. From the standpoint of cloud-based call center technologies, this is an interesting change, as these technologies facilitate what is called the “virtual call center,” meaning that the call center software environment can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection – however it should be noted that Gartner’s report is referring to virtualized computing environments (i.e. VMware, etc.) within the organization, as opposed to the virtualization that is inherent to cloud-based services delivered via the public Internet.

Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 were:

1. Virtualization

2. Cloud computing

3. Servers (beyond blades)

4. Web oriented architectures

5. Enterprise mashups

6. Specialized systems

7. Social software / networking

8. Unified communications

9. Business intelligence

10. Green IT

The research firm’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2010 include:

1. Cloud computing

2. Advanced analytics

3. Client computing

4. IT for green

5. Reshaping the data center

6. Social computing

7. Security

8. Flash memory

9. Virtualization

10. Mobile applications

Ik kende het niet, maar via frenchmaidTV  kwam ik op het volgende: www.dimdim.com. Voor educatie en uitwissel doeleinden is de service gratis tot 20 personen. Wat biedt het:

* videocam. uitwisseling à la skype

* je computerscherm laten zien & delen

* gezamenlijk werken op een whiteboard

* bestanden uitwisselen

* co-browsen van een website

Je hoeft niets te downloaden. Het is allemaal on-line op de site zelf en is echt makkelijk; je hoeft alleen maar een account aan te maken.

Ik ben dol op cijfers uit sociaal wetenschappelijk onderzoek en in dit filmpje heeft Broadbent het over verschillende cijfers die betrekking hebben op nieuwe manieren van communiceren dmv ICT. Het bevestigt ouder onderzoek wat ik ken dat aangeeft dat men wel 100 vrienden kan hebben op facebook, maar toch maar toch vaak maar minder dan met 5 personen echt contact hebben.
Haar eigen onderzoek naar het gebruik mobiele telefoons laat zien dat ‘80% of the calls are made with 4 people’. En als je het heb over skype zijn dat er nog maar 2.

Ondanks dat dit aangeeft dat onze active kring nogal klein is stelt ze dat er een social verschuiving plaats vindt omdat omdat wanneer men contact heeft dat op allerlei tijden gebeurd. Daarmee breken we het oude patronen dat werk en prive meer gescheiden. Het leukste is eigenlijk nog dat ze er op wijst op zich dit patroon al eerder doorbroken had kunnen worden (telefoneren kunnen we al veel langer).

Leuke vraag waar ze mee eindigt hoe lang het nog zal duren dat er in de schoolklassen telefoons uit kinderen hun handen wordt gegrist…

Emerging as one of the most immensely popular social networking sites in the planet, Facebook has also attracted a number of academics to look into the social phenomena and the computing challenges it has brought about. “What Happens When Facebook is Gone?” [2], “On the Evolution of User Interaction in Facebook” [3], and “Unveiling Facebook: A Measurement Study of Social Network Based Applications” [4] are just a few of the growing number of papers on social networking with particular interest on Facebook. These papers are also the subjects of this review.

What Happens When Facebook is Gone?

This paper deals with the reality that websites do come and go no matter how popular or how huge the following. Sites such as Yahoo Mash, Yahoo Photos and Google Lively are examples of terminated websites [2] that once had substantial number of clients. Along with their disappearance was also the loss of many users’ data.

The paper’s authors delved into a variety of mechanisms by which to save important personal data by way of extraction and archiving. However, Facebook’s privacy policy and personal data security measures render it difficult for automated data extraction and archiving. To archive a Facebook account, among the strategies that maybe used are: archiving of bits i.e. to “retain bit patterns of the web pages as they are rendered”; archiving of content i.e. to “retain only the text, images, etc. that appear in the web pages”, and archiving of experience i.e. to “retain the look-and-feel and interactivity of the web pages”.

While privacy issues and the need of Facebook to keep its clients from migrating to other sites is a huge challenge in the development of an archiving service, the authors optimistically speculate that a time will come that the rich content of personal history available in Facebook will become accessible to the site’s users.

On the Evolution of User Interaction in Facebook

This paper by Viswanath et al. provides interesting insights as to how users interact with each of their respective “friends” in Facebook. The authors examined the activity network – “a network that is based on the actual interaction between users, rather than mere friendship” – to distinguish strong or weak links. This deviates from the usual analysis or investigation that is limited only to the network of social links or “friendships” in Facebook.

With the assumption that user interaction vary over time, a scrutiny of the activity network revealed interesting results:

• A big majority (81%) of the user pairs shared no more than five wall post across their link.
• For these infrequently interacting pairs “over 54% of the interactions… can be directly attributed to Facebook’s birthday reminder feature.”
• The abovesaid pairs would usually take more than a month to begin wall interaction after being connected as “friends”.
• For pairs with frequent interaction, pairwise activity starts immediately but the activity level “tends to decrease markedly over time, implying that most activity links die out.”
• For active user pairs, the trend is exhibited to a lesser degree thereby “emphasizing the strength of these links”.

It was also found out that user interaction tend to rapidly change over time. Data showed that user interaction peaks right after the creation of the link and then decays over time i.e. users interact less and less after some time. To note, in a period covering one month 70% of the links in the activity network disappear.But, for user pairs with a high degree of activity, wall posts tend to be more evenly distributed as compared to other pairs.

With these results, we realize how important birthdays are in a social network as  a greeting is a convenient excuse for a conversation. But in a serious note, Facebook developers must look into developing more “system-generated” schemes to catalyze user interaction as in the end their service relies heavily in developing “stronger friendships” over time to retain patrons.

Unveiling Facebook: A Measurement Study of Social Network Based Applications

The paper by Nazir, Raza and Chuah investigates the usage characteristics  and the nature of user interactions derived from their own applications launched using Facebook’s Developer Platform. With the increasing popularity of social network based application, the authors propose that the said type of applications be considered an emerging or new type of workload.

The following applications were launched for the study:

• Fighters’ Club - a social gaming type application wherein users can pick virtual fights with their friends. Friends may then either support any of the opposing camps. The objective of the game is to win by decreasing the opponent team’s limited strength.
• Got Love - a non-gaming application that allows users to “pick a set of ’special’ friends they admire in order to display them as a distinct set of ‘loved’ friends in their user profile page.
• Hugged - also a non-gaming application where users can send an unlimited number of virtual ‘hugs’ to their friends.

The application has gained a substantial following totaling more than eight million users.  Results of the study showed that once an application becomes popular they “remain strong and tend to retain rankings”. Thus, new applications would have to battle it out to gain higher usage ranking.

For gaming applications like Fighters’ Club, “friendship” tends to cross geographical borders as users are more open to form connections with “strangers” which maybe attributed also to the comparatively high number of subscribers. For non-gaming applications such as Hugged and Got Love, users tend to gravitate around a network of friends thus forming a “community”. This can be attributed to the more intimate, friend-to-friend nature of these type of applications.

The paper also tackles the issue of scalability to address the high volume of traffic caused by the popularity of social network based applications. A way to alleviate high traffic is to “segregate information into non-overlapping (or minimally overlapping) chunks. These chunks can then be placed into different locations (for example, in a distributed database), primarily to increase speed of processing requests.” But results showed that “separating data geographically or network-wise does not help social applications.”

An interesting finding is that “the existence of strong clustering in online activity hints at the existence of a possibility of reaching scalability through data segregation”. With this initial information, researchers have another computation aspect to delve in to with the hope of finding solutions to boost the speed of massively popular online network applications.

References:

[1] Facebook. http://www.facebook.com.

[2]  F. McCown, and M. L. Nelson, “What Happens When Facebook is Gone”. JCDL ’09, June 15-19, 2009, Austin, Texas, USA.

[3]  B. Viswanath, A. Mislove, M. Cha and K Gummadi, “On the Evolution of User Interaction in Facebook”, WOSN’09, August 17, 2009, Barcelona, Spain.

[4] A. Naxir, S. Raza and C.Chuah, “Unveiling Facebook: A Measurement Study of Social Network Based Applications”, IMC ’08, October 20-22, 2009, Vouliagmeni, Greece.

In my over twenty years of experience at the large, very successful aerospace company where I labor, I have spent a great deal of time trying desperately to get the IT people to talk to the Engineering people. I haven’t, for the most part, been all that successful. Back in the day IT was truly an empire unto itself and it was pretty blind when it came to listening to the needs of the Engineering community. Furthermore, many of the systems that were used by various programs were dictated by the customers who were paying for our services and our products, basically NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and DOE.

This resulted in some very interesting problems with respect to systems, tools, and their use and subsequent development. What used to happen was Engineering would get an itch for a certain type of functionality but, since it hadn’t been contemplated in the original contract and since it might be some time before it could be renegotiated in order to get some money for developing the code required, Engineering would take it upon themselves to develop what they needed. You can imagine what happened many times. Though not an Engineer myself, I believe all Engineering students study one or more computer languages . .  . I’m fairly certain most of them  do.  Well, they would just get on the problem themselves, either writing code or – even worse – creating a tool in Excel.

So now we find ourselves in the interesting position of having something like a couple hundred tools, many quite useful, many overlapping in functionality. Many of them are unwieldy and kind of out-of-date, yet we don’t quite know how to get rid of them. This does seem to be changing somewhat as the tools of Enterprise 2.0 are gaining traction, i.e. blogs, wikis, user-generated content in general. Regardless, there are still numerous choices for how to deal with each of these as well. What wiki should we use? What about Open Source? (Anathema, btw, in my company – at least for now).

So the beat goes on. We keep adding tools, if at a slightly slower rate than previously (I think), and we seldom shed any. I suspect, as more and more content gets generated through the use of social media, and the ability to organize and make sense of it improves, we will eventually move away from many of the tools we’ve kind of grown up with. Data, too, will probably migrate toward a common format that can be accessed easily by anyone who wishes to and has authority to do so. It would be nice to see everyone on the same page, rather than pockets of people talking about the same thing in slightly different, and frequently incompatible, formats and locations.

The first step on a Social Computing solution should be planning. These are the main topics used for planning a good Social Computing solution with SharePoint 2010.

Microsoft has a very good documentation on this topic that recently just has been published online and can help you plan your solution.

Plan for social computing and collaboration (SharePoint Server 2010)

Two recently launched studies are dealing with the impact of social computing applications on government services, economics and society.

The JRC-IPTS (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Institute for Prospective Technological Services) aims to provide customer-driven support to the EU policy-making process by developing science-based responses to policy challenges. The Centre has launched two reports which can be fully downloaded from their website.

Public Services 2.0

The study “Public Services 2.0: The Impact of Social Computing on Public Services” is focusing on the rise of the social web and trends in public services. Emphasis is on the impact of social computing on key areas like policy, organissation and law. Future opportunities and risks are also addressed. It provides an exhaustive literature review of research and practice in the area of Social Computing and identifies its key impact areas in the public sector.

Enhancing social capital through social networks

The report “The Impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy” provides a systematic empirical assessment of the creation, use and adoption of specific social computing applications and its impact on industry, personal identity, learning, social inclusion, healthcare and public health, and government services and public governance. The study sums up questions like “What is Social Computing?” and provides ideas on enhancing users’ social capital by enabling the multiplication of interactions between offline and online societies. The use of social networks can also contribute to the development of the cultural capital of disadvantaged people and broaden the access to digital content.

Studies on the broad impact of social computing in the public sector are scarce. Apart from examinations of specific computing applications in a public sector, most studies do not examine the generic social computing trend and its effect. The authors also claim that there is a broader theoretical background needed. Further research on digital evolutions should address these gaps.

Social and economic implications of Social Computing

The European Commission JRC, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies
released a comprehensive report on social and economic implications of Social Computing [aka Web2.0, social media].

‘The Impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy’
(Eds.) Yves Punie, Wainer Lusoli, Clara Centeno, Gianluca Misuraca and David Broster
Authors: Kirsti Ala-Mutka, David Broster, Romina Cachia, Clara Centeno, Claudio Feijóo, Alexandra Haché, Stefano Kluzer, Sven Lindmark, Wainer Lusoli, Gianluca Misuraca, Corina Pascu, Yves Punie and José A. Valverde

Report: http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC54327.pdf
News release: http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/index.cfm?id=1410&obj_id=9410&dt_code=NWS&lang=en

This wide report covers different thematic areas. In addition to a cross-cutting analysis across areas in
Ch1: Key findings, Future Prospects and Policy Implications

It contains thematic analysis:
Ch2: The adoption and Use of Social Computing
Ch3: Social Computing from a Business Perspective
Ch4: Social Computing and the Mobile Ecosystem
Ch5: Social Computing and Identity
Ch6: Social Computing and Learning
Ch7: Social Computing and Social Inclusion
Ch8: Social Computing and Health
Ch9: Social Computing and Governance

WTO May Challenge Internet Censorship

WTO May Challenge Internet Censorship: “Reuters is reporting that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is set to release a study claiming that censorship of the Internet is open to challenge by the global regulatory body due to its restrictions on trade.”

Belle de Jour revealed

The Guardian One of the best kept literary secrets of the decade was revealed last night when 34-year-old scientist Dr Brooke Magnanti announced she was the writer masquerading as call girl Belle de Jour.

Featured Editor: Onnik Krikorian

Onnik Krikorian is a British blogger, journalist, and photographer of Armenian decent who has been living in Yerevan, one of the world’s oldest continuously-inhabited cities, for the past 11 years. He is the Caucasus Editor for Global Voices where he amplifies the latest discussions taking place among bloggers in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia. Most recently he has focused his efforts on covering the case against two Azeri bloggers who were sentenced to two and two and a half years in jail.

Social media in South America: Orkut & Brazil

The first in a series of posts on social media in South America by Raquel Recuero for DMLcentral.net, University of California Humanities Research Institute.

To start my participation here in DMLcentral, I want to write about social media outside the U.S., specifically in South America. Let’s take the case of Orkut in Brazil, an interesting and relatively-unknown subject that I’ve researched and followed closely for years. Orkut is very much a cultural phenomenon in Brazil. Although Brazilians had experience with other social networking sites (Fotolog, for example, was very popular among young Brazilians in 2003 and 2004, before Orkut appeared), Orkut caused a revolution in Internet access in Brazil.  As Orkut grew quickly in Brazil starting in 2004, it became synonymous with the Internet. Being on the Internet meant being on Orkut. The question of course is, why?

Against Crowdsourced Politics

The last post begins with the seemingly benign phrase “the promise of digital activism is to crowdsource global political transformation.”  I wrote it and I was pretty proud of myself.  I thought it succinctly summed up the potential of decentralized politics, where power is defined at the edge and by the grassroot, by thousands of ordinary citizens mobilizing together.   Well, Michel Bauwens set me straight.

An Unpoular View of Google Books

I’m starting to feel like the only person who thinks the Google Books settlement with authors and publishers is a good deal. One voice that seems not to be heard, however, over the din of Google competitors, panicky law professors, and regulators who wouldn’t know a workable solution to a copyright problem (created by regulators) if it bit them, is anyone speaking for consumers.

The effects of blogging on small business websites

HubSpot conducted a study recently with more than 1,500 of its customers and determined that small businesses that blog saw, on average, 55% more visitors than those that didn’t.

BBC appoints Alex Gubbay as first social media editor

After announcing late last month that it would create the role of Social Media Editor, the BBC has appointed Alex Gubbay as the first to fill the position.

Currently the Interactive Sports News Editor for BBC Sport, Gubbay will commence his new title in January.

The creation of the position come amidst a wider general campaign run by the BBC to be more ’social media conscious’ and Nic Newman, the BBC’s future media and technology controller, journalism has previously said: “Like a lot of other news organisations, we are at the beginning of something very exciting.”

Italy: Online activism fires up “No Berlusconi Day”

On October 9, Italy’s highest Court ruled that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s immunity from prosecution while in office — guaranteed by a special law passed by his own center-right government in 2008 — was unconstitutional. This decision has reopened two pending trials that accuse Berlusconi of false accounting and bribery.

The Internet, Obama and the Chinese Censors

By Patricia H. Kushlis

I’ve been dubious about the efficacy of social networking for government – or commercial – communication purposes for some time.   At least, I’m skeptical of too much reliance on social networking and the Internet in lieu of all other forms of communication – especially abroad. It is no panacea. Especially in countries like China.

OK.  So call me Neanderthal.

NSeries Nokias Say Goodbye to Symbian, Hello to Maemo

Here’s a bold statement: Symbian S60 is simply not good enough. I’m sure that many Nokia owners and analysts who know that Symbian currently holds around 50% of the smartphone OS market would disagree. But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the new generation of smartphones – primarily Androids, the iPhone, and webOS based devices – are simply better than Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile (up to) 6.5 when it comes to doing what the today’s users want from a smartphone: browsing the web, using Facebook and Twitter, gaming, and finding simple apps that will satisfy their specific needs.

JOURNAL: How to Break and Open Source Insurgency

Short Answer:  divide it.

It’s long been my contention that Iraq was stabilized at an acceptable level of controlled chaos due to a happy accident by al Qaeda (in an attempt to expand/lead the loose insurgency in a new direction).  What did they do?   They blew up the Golden Mosque in Samara in 2006.  This act of symbolic terrorism did indeed disrupt social networks as anticipated, however the consequences were ultimately disastrous for the Iraqi open source insurgency.

5Across: Social Media Marketing 101

There’s a new series of demands being made in company meetings everywhere: “What is our social media strategy? What are we doing on Facebook and Twitter? I want followers and fans, and I want them now!”

Henry’s hand gets Twitterers texting

Last night’s tension filled 2010 World Cup Qualifier between France and Ireland exploded in extra time when French captain Thierry Henry set up what would be the decisive goal after keeping the ball in play with his hand from an offside position.

In class Jeff was talking about how self is defined by the discourse and that there is no “puppeteer” real version of self that exists inside of us.

Wow.

I know Semiotics is not supposed to be looked at like religion and its a tool and it has holes, but I’m loving it. Call bullshit if you want, but think about how that changes everything when we design. I mean look at how we use personnas or scenarios. We build these tools up to work with a given circumstance. The specific ones are typically the ones that help us the most.

My question is about concurrent discourses (think ubiquitous computing or group interaction). Jeff used the example that he acts differently around his mother than other situations. We act a certain way given the context, but what about overlapping contexts. What about when you’re married to a co-worker. Or drinking with a professor. Is this a whole new discourse, or would you consider that a combination of discourses, and if so what changes?

I may be way off here, but before I was only thinking about a single discourse. That makes sense. But when we have a lot going on (as we often do) what does that mean for semiotics?

Om du trodde at sosiale medier er en hype som snart forsvinner, ja, da tar du feil. Sosiale medier griper stadig mer om seg og får stadig sterkere betydning for mennesker over hele verden, enten det er privat eller i jobbsammenheng.

Denne videoen viser deg noen kalde fakta fra de sosiale mediene verden. Disse gjenfinner du listet opp (på engelsk) nedenfor.

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network.
• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web.
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media  
• Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…    
• Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia (note that Facebook is now creeping up – recently announced 300 million users) 
• Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this) 
• comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network 
• 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction 
• 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum  
• % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females  
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  population of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
• 80% of Twitter usage is outside of Twitter…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences? 
• Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
• What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…  
• The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
• Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs  
• 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
• Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
• If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
• Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0 
• 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands  
• People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them 
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
• Only 14% trust advertisements
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI 
• 90% of people that can TiVo ads do 
• Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
• 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
•  According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available 
• 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us. 
• In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second  
• Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

At the end of last week, Industry Week reported on Gartner’s list of the top 10 strategic technologies and trends for 2010. In amongst the usual suspects of cloud computing, green IT and virtualisation there was “social computing”. Industry Week’s spin on that was it should be considered both within the organisation and also as integration with externally facing communities.

In one of my other roles as a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award leader, I’m often brutally aware of how the teenagers we help through the Award – our group takes nearly 200 children through either Bronze, Silver or Gold every year – are much more savvy about social computing than IT professionals like me. 275,000 children every year complete a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, and up until now their basis for recording what they do has been a little blue book with sections to complete for their expeditions, service, physical recreation and skill components.

This year however, the Award has launched “eDofE” amid much fanfare. This is an initiative to be admired, but has missed a great opportunity. You won’t need telling how many of the DofE age group (typically 14-18) actively use Facebook – I know of some 15 year olds who have close to 1,000 “friends” therein. Rather than establishing a secure integration with something like Facebook however, DofE have developed a standalone application into which candidates, trainers, leaders and others involved with the award must register and update their progress.

The trick missed of course, is that this age group are so incredibly comfortable with social computing of this type, that the DofE activities could have seemed like a seamless part of what these kids already do, but it will now sadly be viewed as a standalone process which will be a struggle to use and complete.

With the advent of web2.0 and the perceived success of these technologies, tools, applications & platforms on the internet, making these tools & applications available behind the firewall seems to be the flavor of the season. It seems that any organization worth it’s salt ‘has to have‘ a enterprise 2.0 or web2.0 or a social strategy.  Most of the time, the people leading these initiatives don’t understand the essence of ‘web2.0/social’ applications and these initiatives then get reduced to rolling out blogs, wiki’s, social networking tools behind the firewall and asking people to use them.

This strategy of just rolling out social networking tools, without understanding why social computing works on the internet, is a recipe for disaster and any enterprise2.0 or social computing initiative based on a focus of just the ‘technology’ part will be short lived and not go anywhere. Anyone leading a social computing initiative behind the firewall needs to understand the ’social science’ behind the ‘computing’ to appreciate why it has worked in the internet world and what all ’social’ factors need to be considered and appropriate changes that need to be made in order for it to work in the more restricted ecology of a modern organisation.

Some of the underlying ’social’ concepts that one needs to understand are:

• User Participation: What factors drive user behavior and participation in social computing platforms on the internet? What are the key drivers and how is the organizational playground different from the internet w.r.t these key factors & drivers?
• Emergence & Evolution: Do the managers & leaders of the organization understand the role of emergence in social computing or are they impatient and need all answers upfront and a ‘predictable‘ outcome with all intermediate steps outlined?
• Managing vs Nurturing: Does the environment of the organization  create space for nurturing of people, ideas, thoughts, aspirations of employees or is the organization all about managing numbers, KRA’s etc.
• The Arena Itself: What is good for the goose is not necessarily good for the gander here. The dynamics, the participation levels, the numbers of people participating in the social applications on internet would be vastly different from that behind the firewall.
• Value Networks: Do organizations that want to extend the social computing platforms to their customers/partners etc understand that this is not just as simple as offering these platforms to customers? What are the additional things that need to be done?
• Cultural Alignment: The ’secret sauce’ according to me in the whole recipe of social computing behind the firewall. One could have an organization that understands all this but still does not have the right cultural alignment to make social computing work. What are the critical factors w.r.t culture here?

Social computing has the potential to transform how business operates, how the flow of business knowledge, insights, intelligence and collaboration happens across the organization. Social computing can create alternative & more effective ways of communicating and collaborating across the organization, but the  key to that promise lies in how well the leaders of the social computing initiative understand the above ’social’ concepts & realities.

I will try and outline the key aspects of  each of the above points in more detail in my subsequent posts.

My friend Nirmala asked a question on facebook which a lot of people are asking. What she asked is how we can learn to accept what is non-linear and be happy with emergence. I dont believe the issue is really about geometric shapes, so instead of looking at linearity, i think we could rephrase the question to ask how we can learn to be comfortable with a scenario where not many things can be predicted and simple cause-effect relationships are not so simple at all. In other words:

How can we get to be comfortable with unpredictability and observe and learn from emergence.

I dont pretend to have the answer any more than the next person. But i think over a period of time i have made the transition to some extent. Let me explain how. Over the years i have worked as a trainer and as a consultant. Let me explain the difference in the way these two professions operate and you will get an idea of what i am talking about.

An instructor, when he walks into a class, has a well-defined curriculum which needs to be covered in a definite period. The topics that need to be covered are predefined and the total duration of the course is predefined. Not only that, the time you need to allot to a particular topic is also predefined by the people who developed the courseware. Extend this and even the demonstrations and exercises are very well-structured, to the extent that the courseware also tells the trainer how much time to spend on which exercise or on which demonstration. Now this doesnt work like clockwork but the trainer has quite a good understanding of whether the training is behind schedule at any given point of time, and if so, it is quite simple to find out the things which need to be done to bring it back to schedule.

On the other hand consider working as a consultant implementing packaged software like SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and so on. As any consultant will tell you, requirements are notorious for being highly undefined. The client will come to you with a particular set of requirements, and by the time you configure a solution to meet those requirements, they change. Even if they dont, when you deliver the solution to the client the realize that this wasnt what they wanted after all, and so you need to go back and redefine the solution. Add to this something any consultant or project manager will tell you about, that is scope creep. You could define a solution based on a particular scope for the solution and halfway through they come and tell you that the scope has changed and so the solution needs to be redesigned. Or the additional reports which the client asks for, or changes to existing reports which the client asks for at a later stage of the project. Anyone who has been a consultant would know these.

As you can see the scenarios are different. The question now is how managers can make the change from one to the other. One thing which is important for this is to be able to enjoy the proces of creation, re-creation, refinement, and so on. We would agree that this is easier said than done. Having said that, there are aspects which can help us here. One is to understand that monitoring is not the same as controlling. And controlling is the opposite of enabling people to do more and different things. Now this could be more about the motivation for the change. On an ongoing level, it is important for managers to be able to see maybe two steps forward and to be able to see the various possibilities which exist there. Once this can be done it is relatively simpler to find out what they would want to do for the possibilities which are more probable, and how the next two steps can be managed to arrive at an outcome which is better than the current reality. And if this is treated as a project (no, not literally, but rather as being somewhat similar in terms of structure or nature), and each step of the process by which a scenario emerges is treated as a milestone, it becomes a little simpler for managers to handle uncertainty and manage scenarios which are unpredictable.

This is of course not to say that projects are run in totally unpredictable ways. Project managers agonize over project plans, and a lot of activities associated with them. But, there is still a lot of uncertainty when compared to the training scenario i described. And the question we are asking is not how to remove uncertainty (which is probably not possible) but how to make the transition from the predictable timetable kind of scneario to one with higher levels of uncertainty. This doesnt take care of uncertainty, nor would it enable managers to eliminate uncertainty, but by creating an understanding that emergence by itself is a process, though not structured, managers can appreciate the various steps towards emergence of a new reality. Or, to put it differently, by understanding the process, managers can see the emergence of something new at every step to the emergence of the new scenario.

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Just received my latest UTS Alumni email newsletter.  I completed two postgraduate degrees from UTS.   I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the The Fred Hollows Foundation won the world’s best not-for-profit television advertisement at the International Fundraising Congress in the Netherlands.  Readers may recall that I did a nine month contract with The Fred Hollows Foundation before coming to AusAID earlier this year.

The full excerpt from the UTS alumni newsletter is here:

Fred Hollows’ ad voted best in the world

An advertisement featuring the late Professor Fred Hollows has been named the world’s best not-for-profit television ad at the International Fundraising Congress in the Netherlands. Heading up the advertising campaign was BA Communication (Hons) graduate Joe Boughton-Dent, The Fred Hollows Foundation’s Communications and Community Engagement Manager.

“The 90-second advertisement started out as a YouTube clip… It got a great response and was viewed over 50,000 times, so we knew people were interested in Fred and what he achieved,” says Boughton-Dent.

“People really respond to a positive message that one person can have a real impact,” he says. “This award shows that Fred Hollow’s message is as powerful today as it was when he passed away in 1993.”

The other finalists in the best not-for-profit advertising category included Action Aid, RSPCA and Operation Smile.

The award-winning Fred Hollows ad has been aired on Australian television since June this year. To view it, [visit the clip on] YouTube.”

The knowledge management take from this success is that YouTube clips can make a difference. I firmly believe that such clips are an excellent way of getting important organisational messages and information across, whether internal or external to an organisation.

There really is no excuse for organisations NOT to consider YouTube and other web 2.0 technologies as a legitimate part of the knowledge management and communication armoury. Importantly, web 2.0 technologies like YouTube and audio podcasts should be key considerations for effective knowledge and information management within an organisation’s strategic and functional  information architecture.

Professor McAfee’s new Blog: The Digitization of Business (rss)

Both Gartner and Forrester came up with their technology prediction this month. It is interesting to compare the two – here is a comparison.

This is a recording of a recent presentation Luis did during the “See the Light” road show in Germany, more specifically in Düsseldorf, where they covered Social Computing, an overview of Enterprise social software and this part, which is the talk of my mantra of giving up on e-mail (bit.ly/YRORE).

The video was recorded witha N95 by one of his fellow colleagues, Martti Garden, and in it you would be able to listen to the background of where it all started, what it has implied and where we will be with re-purposing e-mail as our main knowledge sharing and collaboration tool.

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• Understanding Users of Social Networks (jonggunlee.tistory.com)